Wireless/wired networking has a bunch of buzzwords, like anything! Start
asking an Average Joe about SU's or thinwall blocks, and you'll get confused
looks... You mentioned you have a significant tower, and it's talking 12
miles away. Is this line of sight, or near line of sight (NLOS)? How tall is
the tower? Is it guyed, freestanding or bolted to side of a house?
Trees are a killer at 2.4 ghz (but 900mhz will burn right through them). The
leaves themselves hurt more than the wood, because they're mostly water.
This would become more apparent as the leaves fall, and the problem
potentially gets better. 12 miles is a pretty good haul, and you probably
have a gain antenna pointed toward the remote tower. The more focused your
antenna is, the harder it is to keep lock. If mis-alignment or tower waving
is the problem, it should become obviously worse when the wind is blowing.
Charlie made very good points about feedline run. What may be fine for a
hundred foot run on CB can be horrible at ham/UHF, and unusable at 2.4ghz.
since you originally mentioned 'radio on the tower', i assumed you have
ethernet/CAT5 running up the tower, and the radio itself mounted very close
to antenna and probably using POE (power over ethernet) to send the 12VDC or
so to it through the CAT5.
It sounds like you have a fairly complex setup, see how much you can isolate
the various pieces. A *very* last resort might be checking the aiming of
your antenna. It's much more fun to try all the indoor things first.
Hardwiring the shop sounds like a good idea. Put an AP out there should have
good isolation/shielding from the rest of the wifi, and let you easily use
wireless laptop or whatever out there.
Again, Knoppix is great, because you can boot a machine to a guaranteed
virus-free environment and compare it's performance to Windows. It lives
completely in RAM, and there's over a gig compressed on the CD, so it's a
little slower. Click on a menu item and it has to unzip it into RAM. There's
a version of Knoppix called Damn Small
Linux<http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/>that will boot a GUI to a 486
with 16 MB of RAM (and the whole thing is only
48 MB itself). It doesn't have all the tools that full Knoppix does, but
it's great to turn old junk PC's, or laptops with dead HD into another
network station. You can also put it on a USB stick, and have a
portable/bootable safe environment in your pocket. Knoppix is a great
Windows rescue tool, also. It's pretty easy for Windows to get so messed up
that it won't boot, but your stuff is still there. Boot to Knoppix,
configure the network, send everything to a different machine before you
format (or burn it to CD/DVD).
</geek mode off>
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